I made the rose (the left panel) in 2016 and completed it recently by adding the note it came with. A rose in bloom, dried and pressed flat and printed with my mother’s ashes. Minus the card the image felt incomplete, totemic, ambiguous and without context. Her mother’s mother had passed two years prior to my mother sending me this card. She was still grieving. As anyone who loses someone knows, two years is nothing. She sent the white rose, her mother’s favorite, the “first” of summer. She was likely feeling relief after a long Ohio winter and celebrating the change of seasons while still mourning the memory of her mother. The rose came in a card with a Mary Cassatt drypoint on the front, “Maternal Caress”, I assume chosen deliberately. I was in Brooklyn, NY and had been for some time and she knew I was never coming home. It was letters and phone calls and occasional visits to the end of her life. May 21, 2001, she always dated her letters, just a few months before 9/11, the day the towers fell. I was home and saw the planes hit on TV, saw office papers floating down from the sky outside my window, saw people coming home covered in ashes, a man in a suit with a briefcase walking slowly along the sidewalk, head down, drained of everything but the will to walk. Maybe that’s why I positioned the flower like this, ashes and loss and grieving but here the dead rose appears implanted and erect, resilient, something I understood by then regarding my own grief. Now the work feels completed, a story told, while still preserving the ambiguity and inevitable void that seems always to be there when you share a deeply personal experience.